


The Long Way Home Where Your Hands are like Wine

by silvereyedstranger



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Anger, Angst, Bonds, Confusion, Friendship, Hate, M/M, Pain, Romance, Silence, Violence, skinny love, strong love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-03
Updated: 2013-04-03
Packaged: 2017-12-07 09:53:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/747158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silvereyedstranger/pseuds/silvereyedstranger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony knew Loki much before the New York invasion in a way that he never revealed to anyone. However there is always a consequence in silence, so what becomes of a illicit love that’s never spoken of? Not even between the lovers? Both of whom dangle in the threat of destruction of themselves and their worlds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Long Way Home Where Your Hands are like Wine

It’s common knowledge that when frost meets iron, it freezes the surface; solidifies it, and in a peculiar way, it protects the silver metal. Nevertheless, ice is dangerous; forming little kinks in places no one would dare dream of and harbours a slow, insidious poison to the already wounded.

 The Avengers initiative had been scraped ages ago by S.H.I.E.L.D. but the idea never really faded away.

 

Ice.                                          

Tony Stark’s face froze upon the eyes of a man that should have been a stranger, eyes that harbored death and malice as a close companion. His mouth went dry, losing taste and air, his lungs compressing as his breathing reached its minimal capacity. He knew that face well, never mentioning to anyone where it had haunted him. But that had to be irrelevant. This was a war, heroes against villains. Tony knew that The God of Mischief would not stop at nominal damage; that this feud had turned into war.  strife

Yet the billionaire should have known better than to let his feeble emotions play into this confrontation, this hostile takeover of the earth.

He should’ve known better than to blame himself.

There lay an array of files, readings, that Tony still had to do. A strange lick of paranoia crept up his spine and he averted his eyes to the beast. Who would notice, who dared to and who would slide the blade between his bones?  Though the destruction was exceptional, Tony lost his interest in the chaos quickly, another storm wracked him red like clay. _His_ image on the display screen prodded Tony’s attention but the engineer’s glance quickly returned to the left-ward screen, frowning at the so-called Bruce Banner, the nuclear physicist, gamma ray expert, the Ph D in nuclear physics, the Hulk.

_Heroes against villains._

Then there was the American Super Soldier. He wasn’t built for surprises at all, a bit of sugar and spice, a body of what a soldier should exactly have been, perhaps the utter antithesis to what Tony was. The steeled engineer cringed unnoticeably.

But even Anthony couldn’t deny something that prodded at his attention, prodded like a child, a nervous anxious child. The tesseract glowed with the same dangerous cool blue as the mechanical makeshift on his chest. He kept his eyes close to the cube and to the ice. He picked it up, feeling a source of fatality in his hands. Tony remembered the long stories of this cube; he remembered cool hands and a terrible aching of a child’s heart that had swelled his own. But there was silence—there was always silence between them. Even in the flashes of memories all Tony could recall were  moving lips without words, glances without actions and understanding without conversation. It was a gift and a curse— this foreign, unprofessional, telepathy between them.

Tony Stark, the man with everything and yet nothing at all, sat down unto his chair. Suddenly the comfort he purchased it for disappeared, its value depreciating in a matter of moments. The leather groaned and yet Tony kept his face still with paradoxical, fleeting emotions that seemed to cancel one another out. He shuddered and his hands shook violently in need of the copper whiskey. The glass was missing. Another cool touch. It’s always the cold ones.

 With tense jaws he stood up again, kicking the chair slightly back. The whiskey bottle remained unopened for him, a square jar with a kissed opening. He needed it more than he needed Pepper. Pepper. His jaw tensed even further. He befriended suppression years ago when he realized what the crumbling world around him, even the small vicinity of his home, needed from him. He would befriend it again. Nuclear physics had fascinated Stark, it wasn’t as if he was entirely ignorant about the Three C’s, beta-emissions, confinement fusion reactors. Anything that would interest him was the only thing that was important to him—being Tony Stark, of course. He pressed his two first fingers against his temples, pulling together the threads of his concentration away from its stagnation and into the science at hand. His eyes squinted at the tiny, illegible words, some of which were thankfully typed. He skipped past the basics, the inelastic collision of neutrons and the incident with the primary U-238 supplier. Basics. He placed the papers down, in frustration—he frowned, closing his eyes tightly. Stark glanced at his watch that read the time at twenty-eight minutes after ten. He had plenty of time.

The long windows of the room shuddered, a swift movement left an eerie silence in the room. Suddenly Tony Stark missed Pepper’s presence, in a way that he longed for it. But longing? Tony Stark? Was it even programmed into his system at all?

 He frowned, moving the copper and ice far from his side.

_Sir, I do believe that the wind was at a low 12 this evening._

“Yeah. Figured it wasn’t the wind.” He mumbled to his omniscient  friend.

He treaded careful steps towards the windows keeping the steel bracelets locked tight. Tony wasn’t a psychic at all, he didn’t believe in magic much less contain it at all. Yet there was wisp of touched air in his balcony. Someone, someone fast had been there. There was uneasy perplexity in Tony’s stomach that compelled him to question despite feeling the answers already in him. When there was enough white noise in the room again he let out a long breath, not realizing that he had been holding half of it for a while. He shook his head lightly, twitching a small smile and rolling his eyes at himself. Returning to his desk he found a paper, much less like the others in size, astray on the cold floor. With unguarded curiosity he picked it up.

_“I suppose it’s hello again, Man of Iron.”_

**Author's Note:**

> Ohjeez. I have no idea how this'll go. T_T I know it was a slow moving chapter but thing'll pace up I promise! Thank you for reading =//]


End file.
